Tea Shop - ‘flakes cancel Football’s Coming Home for Quatar

One for the football fans here. Glimpsed this story on the front of The Sun one day this week.  Trigger warning -  I don't understand professional football at all - the deeply felt allegiances to essentially a money-making machine with a town's name on it, and the fishy activities of Sepp Blatter at FIFA a few years ago.

I had a look at the lyrics to the 1996 song - my takeaway is "a bit whiney", with its references to "30 years of hurt", i.e. from the time, the only time the England team won the tournament to when the song came out. A lot of reflection on past failure and disappointment, mixed with its catchy, rather hopeless optimism.  I would ditch it if this was my show, if the story is remotely true, of course.

You enter a four-yearly contest, with 30-40 other teams also trying to win, how does you winning one time in 21 instances get played as "hurt"? If it is hurt, why put yourself through it?

Is it still Gareth Southgate? when we had all the taking the knee (like blink and you'll miss it) stuff, I had a sense of an authentic leader and of the players like Marcus Brigstock devoting themselves to playing the game well and rather less of the excess that stems from the Goerge Best era. On that basis, I wish them well in Quatar, whenever it is.